Faculty members who are full-time tenure track at one of our BPI institutions are eligible to apply. Priority will be given to early career faculty.

There is a limit to the number of awards an investigator at a BPI may receive. Faculty may receive up to three Project Awards or four awards that are a combination of Pilot and Project Awards. These are exclusive of Small Awards. The VGN administration recognizes that the BPI institutions are at different stages in developing and sustaining their cultures of research and will accept requests for support for additional funding beyond the guidelines. These requests will be reviewed on an individual basis, and will involve input of the scientific advisor and the BPI coordinator, and supporting documentation that includes summary statements from extramural grants proposals. Progress toward funding must be demonstrated.

VGN Project Awards for 2019

New or Renewal Project Research Awards for Faculty at Baccalaureate Partner InstitutionsApplication Deadline: February 1, 2019 by 4:00 pmFunding Dates: June 1, 2019 - May 31, 2020

The following are conditions of your project award:

Award funds will begin by June 1, 2018 and must be expended by May 31, 2019.

Following the Award, Please Submit:

Revised for Qualifying for second and follow on years of funding:

To qualify to submit an application for a second year of funding of PROJECT awards, faculty should submit to VGN a draft of a proposal that the advisor has reviewed. To qualify for a third year of PROJECT awards, the faculty member must submit a proposal for extramural funding. Deadline for the submissions in each case is June 1.

Submit by September 1st a report describing your summer research and meetings with your research advisor. Your advisor can be paid $200 each grant year for reading your manuscripts and grant applications.

If your research involves Human Subjects or Vertebrate Animals, all required IRB and IACUC documentation should have been submitted with the application to the VGN office.

Your advisor must complete a report about your progress three times per year.

We expect you to Attend the following:

Annual VGN Career Day for students in April 11, 2018.

VGN Networking and Professional Development Seminar, April, 2018.

Attend and present a poster at the VGN Annual Retreat on August 15, 2018 and our Annual Retreat in August 2019.

VGN Pilot Awards for 2019

New or Renewal Pilot Research Awards for Faculty at Baccalaureate Partner Institutions
Application Deadline: February 1, 2019 by 4:00 pmFunding Dates: June 1, 2019 - May 31, 2020

The following are conditions of a PILOT award:

Award funds will begin by June 1, 2018 and must be expended by May 31, 2019.

Following the Award, Please Submit:

Revised for Qualifying for second and follow on years of funding:

To qualify to submit an application for a second year of funding of PILOT awards, faculty should submit to VGN a draft of a proposal that their advisor has reviewed. To qualify for a third year of PROJECT awards, the faculty member must submit a proposal for extramural funding OR a manuscript that has been submitted to a peer reviewed journal. Deadline for the submissions in each case is June 1.

Submit by September 1st a report describing your summer research and meetings with your research advisor. Your advisor can be paid $200 each grant year for reading your manuscripts and grant applications.

If your research involves Human Subjects or Vertebrate Animals, all required IRB and IACUC documentation should have been submitted with the application to the VGN office.

Your advisor must complete a report about your progress three times per year.

We expect you to Attend the following:

Annual VGN Career Day for students in April 11, 2018.

VGN Networking and Professional Development Seminar, April 2018.

Attend and present a poster at the VGN Annual Retreat on August 15, 2018 and our Annual Retreat in August 2019.

Review of Applications Process:

The review of Project and Pilot Award applications begins with the assignment of the application to at least two and preferably three outside reviewers. Each reviewer receives your application in electronic form. The reviewers are given the RFA and criteria for review that are used by NIH. We ask that the reviewers provide a score and write a short response to each of the criteria (Significance, Investigator(s), Innovation, Approach, Environment) as well as an overall score. As with NIH reviews, when the reviewer has completed the assignment and submitted reviews online, the reviewer can then see the critiques of others who have the same application assignments. Reviewers are compensated for this work. This is a confidential process and the reviewers are asked not to share any insights into their reviews or even which applications they reviewed, just as at NIH. We do not share the list of reviewers because the pool of reviewers is not as large as at NIH. We ask the BPI Coordinators for help in identifying qualified reviewers.

Once the reviews and scores are compiled, the VGN PI and PC read the reviews and analyze the results. The pay line is determined by the amount of funding that is available for projects and pilots that year. Other meta data are considered when making the final decisions about funding. These include compliance with VGN requirements for funding, advisors' reports, and the critiques of proposals submitted to federal agencies.

VGN Small Awards

If you are interested in applying for a Small Award, contact the Baccalaureate Partner Institution (BPI) Coordinator to discuss your proposal submission. All Small Award applications must be submitted to the VGN email address (vgn@uvm.edu) by the BPI Coordinator. There is a rolling application deadline for this funding mechanism.